Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  He shakes his head like he’s trying to wake up. “Let me get this straight: you drove all the way down here – at a time like this – so you could get me to give you a scalpel and – ” He glances down, looking right at her face. “What exactly is it you’re going to do?”

  They look into one another’s faces for an instant, the way they never used to do when they loved each other. And if she ever loved anyone before Brigs, out of all the other boys, this was who it was – this is Brigs’s forerunner. Maybe that’s the real reason why she’s come here, not even twenty-four hours after Brigs died. She’s trying to rediscover the beginning of the way that leads back to her husband.

  It happens so fast the doctor doesn’t even sense that she’s reached her hand out, snatching at his hand until she’s already holding it in both of her own. His hand is smaller than Brigs’s, over-washed, and cold. In this small town with its one doctor’s office, there isn’t anyone for miles who doesn’t know the doctor’s hand by now. For a second, he thinks she might just want what all the other widows want when they come to see him, and he closes his fingers around hers, loosely, in that clinical, comforting hold of his.

  But she’s tracing a line down the back of his hand, firm and straight – marking the bone that runs from his wrist to his first knuckle. “I want one these,” she says. “Not yours,” she hurries when she feels him jerking away. “I want one of these bones from Brigs’s hand. Don’t worry, I asked him ages ago if I could have one. He said I could take it. I’m pretty sure he said so.”

  When she knows Dan understands, she drops his hand. Now that it’s free, he holds his hand up under the fluorescent lights and looks for the invisible trace of the line she’s drawn on his skin. “You want me to give you a scalpel and a – tutorial – so you can cut a bone out of your deceased husband’s hand.”

  “Yes. Well, ideally you’d come with me and cut it out of him yourself –”

  He steps back, until his spine is pressed against the closed door.

  “But I know that’s too much to ask so – so, here I am.”

  He hooks the bottom of a wheeled stool with his foot. “Sit down,” he tells her.

  “I don’t have a lot of time – ”

  “Sit down, Carrie,” he repeats, sitting on the stool himself. She obeys and he wheels his seat over to the chair she’s chosen. He leans his elbow on her chair’s metal arm. “Look, everyone grieves in his or her own way. I counsel a lot of people and I’ve learned to respect that. I’ve seen some bereaved people who shut right down and can’t do anything. And I’ve seen other people who get – manic.”

  “You think I’ve gone crazy.”

  His chin droops to his chest. “I think you’re beside yourself – and understandably so. But you can’t go carving up your husband for comfort. Cutting doesn’t bind, it breaks. I honestly think this kind of operation couldn’t possibly do anything but upset you even more. And – and it’s not appropriate.”

  “Appropriate – what the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that people will come to the viewing and wind up having to deal with seeing his hand is all – tampered with. Someone could quite possibly call the police.”

  She doesn’t hesitate. “Tampered with? It’s not like the organ procurement people haven’t already picked though him. He hasn’t exactly got pristine remains anymore. Besides, if I have him cremated, no one will ever be able to tell what has or hasn’t been tampered with.”

  The doctor glances over his shoulder and lowers his voice. “But the body is sacred, Carrie. You know that. We don’t keep physical souvenirs of human bodies rattling around with the living.”

  She sits up straight in her chair. “They do in the Philippines. Brigs had whole pages of pictures of Philippine cemeteries in his photo album. Their graveyards are full of piles of dry bones sorted into heaps – skulls over here, femurs over there. And they’re just stacked up, like firewood or cannon balls, resting on top of the crypts and between the crosses.”

  “But isn’t that just a vestige of poverty? I mean, people might be used to it and they’re making the best of it but that doesn’t mean it’s an ideal situation.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Ethnocentric much?”

  He ignores it. “And don’t forget that you still have something literal left over from Brigs himself. You have all those fine heirs you produced for him.”

  He’s trying to be sweet – trying to make her laugh – but she throws herself backward into her chair, like she’s disgusted. “Don’t give me that living-on-through-his-children nonsense. The boys are not him. They’re themselves. And their destiny has always been to leave me.”

  The doctor sits back too, and a silent moment passes while they both hate each other. “Why don’t you let me give you something to help you sleep instead?” is what he finally offers. “I can write you a prescription and you can take what you need until you’re calm and rested and thinking more clearly.” He’s already scrawling something on a prescription pad. He’s using the same serial killer handwriting he had back in university.

  “Sleeping pills do not work on me.” She’s wrenching his pen away from him, throwing it over his shoulder, against the closed door. There’s a tiny knock just as the pen hits the wood, as if someone has been listening from the outside, waiting to break in once they were sure Carrie had snapped. The door opens and the receptionist sticks her head inside the room.

  “Everything okay?” she sings.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” the doctor answers. “You can go now. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  But the receptionist just stands there.

  “Really. It’s okay. Please go.”

  She leaves but the door stays ajar.

  Carrie jumps to her feet and slams the door. She’s spinning around, pulling at the locked drawer again, asking, “So, would it be better for me to cut in first at the wrist or at the knuckle – or in between?”

  The doctor sighs and shakes his head.

  She kicks at the cabinet hard enough to leave a dent in its side. “I don’t need you for this, you know. I’m still a very resourceful girl and I could get this done with nothing but a razor blade from my toolbox, flashbacks from zoology class, and what would probably amount to some pretty gruesome trial and error.”

  The doctor has spun his stool around to look at her. “Just snip off a lock of his hair – ”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Or a sliver of his fingernail – ”

  “Gross.”

  “Carrie – ”

  “No, keep going, Dan. You’re getting closer. The next thing is to suggest I pull out one of his teeth.”

  The doctor sighs again and runs both of his hands through his own hair. He pulls back, shocked, when he feels her hand in his hair too. Carrie is standing right next to him and she’s teased out one short, white lock from the rest of the dark brown strands. “Look at it,” she says in a moan. “Your hair – it really is getting grey.”

  He looks up as she drops her hand away. “Don’t do it,” he says. “I’m asking you – please. Don’t cut him. You can’t lawfully do it. It says so right in the Criminal Code.”

  “But the bone – all that time – it was him, it was mine, wasn’t it? And even now, isn’t it still mine?” And that’s when she starts to cry. He’s been waiting for it – almost wishing for it – but it hits him right in the guts anyway.

  She sits down on the floor of the exam room, her knees bent up to her eye level, sobbing, with both her palms pressed against her eyelids.

  And the doctor is nodding and patting her knee in a familiar, doctor-ly pantomime of compassion. But then she’s sliding away, rising to kneel on the dingy white tiles at his feet. He sits back, gaping down at the head of blonde hair slumped against the side of his leg. He’s not sure if it’s real but he thinks he might be able to smell something – sweet like th
e rosewater she used to dab in her hair when she was his.

  “Please,” she begs against his shin.

  “Carrie – come on, now. Get up. Carrie – Caroline – don’t.”

  “Please, Dan – please. Help me. I can’t risk ending up with nothing.”

  She’s sobbing too hard to hear his last sigh – the one where he empties his lungs right down to their tidal volume. He glances up at the exam room door to make sure it’s firmly latched before he takes a small key from the ring in his pocket, leans toward the cabinet, and unlocks the one drawer she couldn’t open. And then he’s on his knees too, down on the floor in front of her, pushing her upright, gripping her wrist, pulling her hand away from her face. He’s holding something wrapped in a small, stiff rectangle of heavy, sterile foil. He’s pressing it into her palm, finally ready to make the offering.

  “Lead with the curved edge, not with the tip,” he says. “Don’t stab. Slice.”

  Twenty-Three

  Remember that book we used to read to the kids – the one where it’s promised that, in the end, no one is told any story but their own? After all I’ve said here, I guess it must not be true. Or maybe it’s just that we lived our lives together well enough to make the story of me into the story of you. And then again, maybe there is only one great, inextricable story – the story of everyone the whole world over. As it turns out, it’s all the same.

  But even though everything’s clear to me now – all the smirks and sighs, every word of every uncle and cousin, the insides of your teeth and bones – I can hardly see you as you are at this moment. I need to stop trying. I know that. You will arrive. And the wait won’t be too long – not like it will seem to you.

  Still, I stoop and strain to watch you through the mounting dimness of these fine new eyes. You are closed inside a house, sitting at a kitchen table, hemmed in by stacks and stacks of widow’s paperwork. The federal government wants my social insurance card back – sealed in an envelope and mailed across the country to be officially obliterated. The address for the office is in New Brunswick, about an hour’s drive from Butcher Hill.

  I want to reach through everything in between and lift the hair falling down your back. I want to see if there’s any trace of it – the clasp of a chain, the tied ends of a leather strap – anything to show if you got the token, the bone, you once asked me to give to you out of the top of my hand. There’s nothing in the hand I have now to tell me.

  You must know – in the end, I would have given it, freely, if I’d been able.

  And there are other questions. I could still see long enough to know that the accident didn’t leave my body mangled. It was a hard impact from one side – a steel bumper jammed into the door of my car as the truck driver of the apocalypse failed to yield to me at a stop sign, or something. It rocked me with a sideways whiplash, sending the sharp edge of my own vertebrae cutting through the nerves in my neck that keep me breathing and beating. My heart and lungs waited and waited between my ribs, beneath the breach – perfect and whole and suddenly and completely forgetful of everything they used to do and why they ever did it.

  It’s not like it was with my dead mother. The ambulance was there in minutes, even though the truck driver was standing shaking on the pavement and there was nothing they could do for me. I died instantly and beautifully. Everyone tells you so, over and over again. You could have buried me face up on a satin pillow, mouth pressed into a gentle smile at the head of a casket, a little swollen in the neck but completely unburnt. My body could have been made into a museum exhibit, enshrined in a cathedral – or simply filed underground if you’d changed your mind and decided you wanted it that way. I just don’t know. Maybe after all the fussing, it was never very important how you got rid of what was left of me.

  Whatever happened to the art of casting full facial death masks? I can remember the pictures I’ve seen of Napoleon’s death mask – and Lincoln’s and Joseph Smith’s and Isaac Newton’s. As far as I know, the closest thing there is to a death mask of me are those dental impressions they needed in order to make the mouthguard that was supposed to keep me from grinding my teeth away in my sleep. Maybe you remembered those plaster teeth and gums, wrapped in bubbled plastic on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. Maybe they satisfied your need for my body, and you didn’t try to take a bone from my hand after all.

  I look at the hand I have now and I still can’t tell.

  But I can see into your lowest point of this valley. I am watching, somehow, the night after the funeral as you stand in the backyard, out of the range of the square eye of yellow light coming through the kitchen window onto the lawn. And my brother’s wife stands with her hand on your waist while he clamps you in arms so much like my own they could almost wrap around you twice. And he bows his head over you and smothers your face into the front of himself as if your grief is a fire for him to crush into extinction. And your mouth is full of his black, hooded sweatshirt as you wail into him – unheard by our sons, or my last parent, or anyone else who could not abide the day.

  “Carrie,” he rumbles, “I’m sorry. I’m not Brigs.”

  “No,” you answer. “I am.”

  Acknowledgements

  It seems like most people who finish a book and sell the manuscript have either already raised a family or haven’t started to raise one yet. The rest of us have very patient, understanding, and indulgent spouses and children. I must acknowledge these traits in Anders and in our sons, Jonah, Samuel, Nathan, Micah, and little James who was just three years old when I finished the first draft of this novel. Thanks, boys.

  And thanks to my publisher, Linda Leith, for including me in her brave new venture. I must also acknowledge the memories of my nearest kindred dead: Bob McCarthy, Ralph and Thelma MacKenzie, and especially Bryan Quist. Thank you for cradling me in your lives and in your deaths.